When I set out to start this little software company, I swore to myself that Sifter was a marathon, not a sprint. While I've done a pretty good job at staying true to that oath, I'd be lying if I said that it was easy. Balancing time between customer-facing features and back-end refactoring and upgrades is difficult. Continued…
We're big believers in evolutionary design rather than revolutionary design. With milestones, this became especially true. I briefly shared our thinking behind designing and building milestones into Sifter, and this is a follow up to show how our thinking and the interface have evolved. Continued…
Earlier this morning, we finished making some long overdue, but behind-the-scene improvements to Sifter. We've been working on these changes since our unscheduled downtime a couple of weeks ago, and taking steps to make sure that doesn't happen again has... Continued…
Sifter was down for several hours late last night due to a hardware issue. The problem has been resolved, and, naturally, we're taking steps to prevent any recurrences of the problem going forward. Continued…
Since I began thinking about adding milestones to Sifter, I've been thinking about some really cool integration throughout the interface. That thinking led to a significant amount of time sketching and designing how they would work. The more I designed,... Continued…
Sixteen months after leaving a comfortable full-time job to try and make a living off of a hosted web application, I'll be going full-time on Sifter. I put together a visualization showing how Sifter has grown over time and marked the significant milestones in our history. Continued…
Receiving feedback is a time-consuming process. Unfortunately, even the most eloquent and brilliant feature requests aren't guaranteed to make it into an application. Every developer or team has to choose their battles, and while customer requests carry weight, they aren't the only factors. We've put together a list of the four factors we use to decide if a feature makes it into production. Continued…
If there's anything about Sifter that I have a love-hate relationship with, it's managing feature requests. On one hand, feature requests and customer feedback are the most valuable ways of understanding where we should steer the ship, and the people that take the time to share are priceless. On the other hand, some people request features with the entitlement of spoiled children who have never heard the word "no" in their lives. Continued…
Features. It's such an innocuous word. New features can usually be summarized in a single word, and therein lies the problem. For instance, implementing Search was much more complicated than its one-syllable description might imply. Most features unfold in a... Continued…
We've got a lot of things going on, and while there haven't been any major updates since the visual refresh and OpenID, the next few months should be big. Continued…
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We built a simple bug and issue tracker named Sifter and we blog about it when we're not working on it. We think it’s a great way to get feedback and keep everyone updated on our status.
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